Fighting Bias in Higher Education
On NoIndoctrination.Org, College Students Report Professor Bias
Feb 24, 2007
Is professor bias in higher education a serious problem? Heated debate has surrounded this issue on college campuses, along with debate about required "sensitivity" trainings during freshman orientations. Because she believed her son had encountered bias in college, Luann Wright founded NoIndoctrination.Org, a website where college students can complain anonymously about professors and college programs that (in their opinion) try to indoctrinate as opposed to educate. Unlike anonymous professor rating websites like RateMyProfessor.com, NoIndoctrination.Org investigates complaints and does not report them unless evidence supports a student's argument.
Does this website provide a valuable service? Does it infringe upon the rights of professors? Here's an interview with Luann Wright, the founder of NoIndoctrination.Org.
1) How did NoIndoctrination.Org get started?
When my son started college in the fall of 2000, I began to hear troubling reports about certain required writing programs at UC San Diego. Students felt that some of these programs had been hijacked by ideological zealots in order to promote sociopolitical agendas rather than the all-important skills of thinking and writing. Using the California Public Records Act, I discovered that UCSD’s own faculty review committee wrote a 1998 report that criticized the one-sided politicized nature of some of these writing programs. A 1999 report described them as “compulsory chapel.” Even with these faculty reports, those with academic responsibility failed to rein in the abusers; the mandatory thought reform was allowed to continue. Further research confirmed this to be a nationwide problem. Courses and programs are frequently misused – in violation of official statements on academic freedom and faculty conduct. After speaking with administrators, trustees, and legislators (to no avail), I decided a new tactic was needed. Hence, I began the nonpartisan, nonprofit NoIndoctrination.org
2) What do you hope to accomplish with this site?
Students, as well as faculty, need to know their rights and obligations. NoIndoctrination.org wants our colleges and universities to promote and honor their stated commitments to open inquiry, freedom of thought and expression, and professional conduct. With education and exposure, we believe change is possible.
3) How does your site work?
Our website's Academic Freedom pages provide many examples of academic freedom and professional conduct statements that various academic associations and institutions of higher education claim to endorse. When institutions fail to live up to these commitments, our website offers a safe place for students and faculty to report instances of perceived abuse. Our FAQ pages provide questions to consider before filling out a posting form. We ask for detail and corroborating evidence when appropriate. After we receive a posting, we research what the poster wrote and then contact the poster. By email and/or phone, we try to get to the bottom of the complaint. If the concerns seem valid, the posting goes online. We then contact the professor or administrator and encourage a rebuttal of any specifics. Rebuttals are posted beneath the complaint. Posters tell us they appreciate our thoroughness in researching their postings. Since retaliation is a legitimate concern, we do not divulge our posters’ names.
Also, many students contact us to ask for help in dealing with professors. We offer assistance and advice. Sometimes our help enables a troubling situation to be remedied – making an online posting unnecessary. (Most professors and administrators want to do the right thing. Some just need a reminder.)
4) Do you think academia has a liberal bias?
There have been many studies that claim certain departments or programs are ideologically skewed, generally to the left. If it is found that any department or professor is using political litmus tests (either left or right) to influence faculty hiring, promotion, or student grading, such practices must be stopped. It should be pointed out that NoIndoctrination.org is not concerned with the political leanings of professors. We do not care what they are putting in the ballot box, but we do care what they are doing in the classroom. Professionalism (not ideology) is our focus, and our postings reflect this. While most postings reflect unprofessional conduct on the left, there are other postings that reflect unprofessionalism on the right.
5) Some professors are concerned about your site and similar movements because they fear McCarthy-like backlash. They argue that free speech in the academy is imperative for a healthy democracy and point to instances where professors were fired during the McCarthy era for having leftist views. How would you respond to these concerns?
NoIndoctrination.Org has never asked that professors be fired -- only that professors honor their institutions' policies. We totally agree that "free speech in the academy is imperative for a healthy democracy." The problem is that too many professors turn the Socratic Method into a Socratic Mugging. Incivility turns classrooms into hostile work environments, hardly conductive to the free exchange of ideas. Students in the interpretive disciplines need to be able to analyze critically the best arguments from a variety of perspectives, yet all too often students are denied such analysis. We find "indoctrination" masquerading for education, speech codes replacing free speech, and thuggery being used to silence dissent. Such tactics are used in repressive regimes; they must never be tolerated in a free society.
6) Others are concerned that your site (along with other sites that rate professors anonymously) are an infringement on professors' privacy and may constitute libel or defamation of character. How would you respond to these concerns?
Academic freedom protects professors when they write or speak outside the classroom, and we support this. Our concerns are with courses and programs such as freshman orientations. Evaluating professors is nothing new. Many colleges have had teacher/course ratings for decades. Students, like all Americans, have freedom of expression. Let me quote First Amendment scholar Professor Robert M. O’Neil: “Academic freedom protects our [professors’] right to express outrageous views with virtual impunity, to be sure. But the corollary is that we can hardly expect to be free of criticism for what we say in or out of class. That is a lesson that seemed to be fully understood in the print world; there should be no lesser acceptance in the digital world of the Internet simply because it may now be easier to complain or criticize, and because the language used for that purpose may be more acerbic.”
In other words, academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism. We believe our website permits criticism in a responsible manner.
7) Do you think most students use NoIndoctrination.Org responsibly? Do you think some students use sites like this as a way to get back at teachers who gave them low grades or whom they simply do not like?
Those who do not use our website responsibly do not find their postings online. We reject many of the postings we receive. (Some are bogus; others are from students who are so ideologically inflamed that they cannot tolerate different viewpoints; still others are from students who will not answer our questions or send requested material.) We have seen our rejected postings on other websites. Yes, some students may use the Internet to get back at teachers for poor grades, etc. That is why we insist on detail and why we try to verify each post carefully. Students know we encourage professors to rebut any specific in their post, and this helps prevent exaggeration and misstatements. This diligence gives our postings credibility.
8) Do you think professors can voice their personal views in the college classrooms in ways that benefit all of the students? If so, how?
Off-topic classroom soap boxing is in violation of accepted standards of professional conduct, and higher education officials can and should insist that classroom professors stick to their subjects. Professors in the interpretive disciplines, however, do have a right to express their personal views on course-related topics. If they choose to inject their own biases and personal opinions concerning unsettled issues, they should do so as intellectual guides - not as sociopolitical propagandists. This means that scholarly alternative views are explored, and challenges are welcomed and encouraged. These professors must never denigrate, intimidate, nor compel or browbeat students into agreement. When handled responsibly, professors’ (and students’) personal views can be expressed in the classroom – as long as these views can be studied and challenged with academic rigor and civility.
9) Is there anything else you would like to add?
Here are links to two papers I delivered at academic conferences that might also be useful:
“Academic Freedom in the Classroom: When ‘Freedom’ Becomes ‘License’” (http://www.noindoctrination.org/AERA-noindoc.pdf)
“The Pernicious Politicization of Academia: Fact or Fiction?”
(http://www.noindoctrination.org/NoIndocCombined.pdf)
So what do you think of NoIndoctrination.Org? Leave your comments in the discussion!
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